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759f56d
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Being alone is the most awful thing in the world. You visit your museums and cultivate your interests and remind yourself how lucky you are not to be one of those spindly Sudanese children with flies beading their mouths. You make out To Do lists - reorganise linen cupboard, learn two sonnets. You dole out little treats to yourself - slices of ice-cream cake, concerts at Wigmore Hall. And then, every once in a while, you wake up and gaze ..
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Zoë Heller |
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725abea
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It's similar to the way you feel cuddling an infant or a kitten, when you want to squeeze it so hard you'd kill it...
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obsession
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Zoë Heller |
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a3e2a11
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All my life I have been the sort of person in whom people confide. And all my life I have been flattered by this role - grateful for the frisson of importance that comes with receiving important information. In recent years, however, I have noticed that my gratification is becoming diluted by a certain weary indignation. They tell me because they regard me as safe. All of them, they make their disclosures to me in the same spirit that they ..
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loneliness
trust
secrecy
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Zoë Heller |
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0d97c83
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It's always a disappointing business confronting my own reflection. My body isn't bad. It's a perfectly nice, serviceable body. It's just that the external me- the study, lightly wrinkled, handbagged me- does so little credit to the stuff that's inside.
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Zoë Heller |
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8d44af8
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I'm a child in that respect: able to live, physically speaking, on a crumb of anticipation for weeks at a time, but always in danger of crushing the waited-for event with the freight of my excessive hope.
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Zoë Heller |
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5d68d2d
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Things that are truly innocent don't need to be labelled as such.
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Zoë Heller |
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729c87b
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In the end, I suspect, being female will do nothing for Sheba, except deny her the grandeur of genuine villainy.
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Zoë Heller |
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e656eb9
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I mean, what is romance, but a mutual pact of delusion? When the pact ends, there's nothing left.
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Zoë Heller |
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97938d0
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There it was again - the perverse refusal to acknowledge my hostility. She seemed to me like some magical lake in a fairy tale: nothing could disturb the mirror-calm of her surface. My snide comments and bitter jokes disappeared soundlessly into her depths, leaving not so much as a ripple.
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Zoë Heller |
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7f866b8
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Talking to him is rather like talking to a school play.
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Zoë Heller |
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9a34fa0
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The number of secrets I receive is in inverse proportion to the number of secrets anyone expects me to have of my own. And this is the real source of my dismay. Being told secrets is not - never has been - a sign that I belong or that I matter. It is quite the opposite: confirmation of my irrelevance.
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Zoë Heller |
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920fca1
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I cannot do this anymore. I cannot pull myself together again and spend the next fifteen hours of wakefulness fending off the fact of my own misery.
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Zoë Heller |
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b5f1a71
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It is always difficult, the transition from noisy refusal to humble acceptance.
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Zoë Heller |
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d7d70fd
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It seems to me that my lack of faith is not, as I once thought, a triumph of the rational mind, but rather a failure of the imagination - an inability to tolerate mistery.
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failure-of-imagination
rationality
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Zoë Heller |
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8549324
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One pretends that manners are the formalisation of basic kindness and consideration, but a great deal of the time they're simply aesthetics dressed up as moral principles, aren't they?
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Zoë Heller |
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f3cf570
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I don't cook anything fancy. Sheba's appetite isn't up to much and I've never been one for sauces. We eat nursery food mainly. Beans on toast, Welsh rarebit, fish fingers. Sheba leans against the oven and watches me while I work. At a certain point, she usually asks for wine. I have tried to get her to wait until she's eaten something, but she gets very scratchy when I do that, so these days I tend to give in straightaway and pour her a sma..
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snob
food
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Zoë Heller |
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7d9aa68
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The conclusion of Dowell's narrative offers not a resolution, so much as a plangent confirmation of complexities. While Ford would certainly have agreed with Dowell that it is a novelist's business to make a reader 'see things clearly', his interest in clarity had little to do with simplicity. There is no 'getting to the bottom of things', no triumphant answers to the epistemological muddle offered in this beautiful, bleak story - only a fi..
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Zoë Heller |
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7aa17fc
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But that I should have ended up in a place like this seems too custom-made a nightmare to be the work of mere ill fortune.
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life
ill-fortune
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Zoë Heller |
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78a141e
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Up to this moment in her life, Audrey had never evinced the slightest sentimentality about children. Insofar as she had recognized them as an independent category of personhood, she had tended to think of them as trainee humans. Inadequate adults. She loved her own daughters well enough - wanted them to be happy and so forth - but they had failed to inspire in her that mad, lioness passion to which other mothers so preeningly testified. She..
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Zoë Heller |
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d5b1045
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The story of Carol's transformation evoked complicated feelings in Rose. It appalled her, of course. The idea of an educated, metropolitan woman voluntarily casting off every vestige of modernity in order to make herself over as a medieval ghetto-dweller was unconscionable - but it also inspired a sneaking envy. By submitting to the restraints of Orthodoxy, Carol had not only performed an impressive act of self-denial - an act guaranteed to..
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Zoë Heller |
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0a3f007
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How had she ended up like this, imprisoned in the role of harridan? Once upon a time, her brash manner had been a mere posture - a convenient and amusing way for an insecure teenage bride, newly arrived in America, to disguise her crippling shyness. People had actually enjoyed her vituperation back then, encouraged it and celebrated it. She had carved out a minor distinction for herself as a 'character': the cute little English girl with th..
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Zoë Heller |
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bc25281
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Depression, in Karla's experience, was a dull, inert thing - a toad that squatted wetly on your head until it finally gathered the energy to slither off. The unhappiness she had been living with for the last ten days was a quite different creature. It was frantic and aggressive. It had fists and fangs and hobnailed boots. It didn't sit, it assailed. It hurt her. In the mornings, it slapped her so hard in the face that she reeled as she walk..
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Zoë Heller |
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2fbad9a
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Audrey nodded warily. She had never cared for conspiratorial female conversation of this sort. Its assumption of shared preoccupations was usually unfounded in her experience, its intimacies almost always the trapdoor to some subterranean hostility.
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Zoë Heller |
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7f1731e
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There was a time when she would have lingered to hear what amusing or sinister characteristic the woman attributed to the man's Jewishness - what business acumen or frugality or neurosis or pushiness she assigned to his tribe - and then, when she had let the incriminating words be spoken, she would have gently informed the woman that she was Jewish herself. But she had tired of that party game. Embarrassing the prejudices of your countrymen..
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Zoë Heller |
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149244e
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There were some people with a gift for conviction - a talent for cutting a line through the jumbled phenomena of world affairs and saying, 'I'm in: this is my position.' Audrey had it. All of the Litvinoffs had it, to some extent. It was a genetic thing, perhaps. Jean had seen a film once, about a troop of French soldiers in World I who were charged with getting a cannon to their fellow soldiers, trapped under enemy fire. For weeks, they ca..
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Zoë Heller |
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18dd7f7
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Sheba has often told me that she thinks there's a rhythm to married life, an ebb and flow in the pleasure that a couple take in one another. The rhythm varies from couple to couple, she says. For some couples, the see-saw of affections takes place over a week. For others, the cycle is lunar. But all couples sense this about their life together - the way in which their interest in one another builds up and recedes. The happiest couples are t..
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Zoë Heller |
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d96926e
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She was not so swept away that she could not see the high comedy of this spiritual seduction: a Litvinoff daughter, a third-generation atheist, an enemy of all forms of magical thinking, wandering into synagogue one day and finding her inner Jew. But there it was. Something had happened to her, something she could not ignore or deny. And there was a sense in which its unlikelihood, its horrible inconvenience, was precisely what made it so c..
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Zoë Heller |
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e2b11de
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But I doubt very much that Sheba's comic oddity will actually earn her more lenience from the court. In all likelihood, she'll receive exactly the same punishment as a man. The guardians of gender equality won't stand for anything else. In the end, I suspect, being female will do nothing for Sheba except deny her the grandeur of genuine villainy.
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Zoë Heller |
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cfc7c5c
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I'm a child in that respect: able to live, psychically speaking, on a crumb of anticipation for weeks at a time, but always in danger of crushing the waited-for event with the freight of my excessive hope.
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Zoë Heller |
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a82d233
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People always seemed to think that you stopped believing things in a single, lightning-bolt moment, an instantaneous revelation of loss. For her, at least, the process of disenchantment had been achingly slow.
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Zoë Heller |
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2cb5e04
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Joel, for all his talk of communal childrearing and tribes, deeply resented the idea that Lenny should have succeeded in evoking Audrey's passion where her 'real' children had failed. 'Karla and Rosa are your flesh and blood,' he would chide her. But these appeals to sanguine loyalty missed the point, she felt. If anything, the fact that Lenny was not hers made it easier to love him. As the coauthor of Karla and Rosa, she could not help but..
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Zoë Heller |
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b6d05f7
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If this was cynical, then we must allow that all courtship is cynical.
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cynicism
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Zoë Heller |